16 May, 2012

Galaxy Note ICS XXLPY phone bricks - advice

not all phone bricks are irrecoverable. it depends what you have done before and what can be done next

A BIT OF ADVICE

there are two kind of phone bricks: soft bricks and hard bricks. in fact, soft bricks are relative easy and possible to recover but hard bricks are not recoverable even with JTAG recovery

soft bricks:
- you can still see the phone boots up with the Samsung Galaxy Note GT-N7000 logo
- the phone enters a boot loop, ie keeps rebooting after booted up
- you are able to enter the recovery mode by pressing and holding the volume up button, home button, and the power button
- you are able to enter the download mode by pressing and holding the volume down button, home button, and the power button
- you are able to enter the download mode with a usb jig
- your phone boots but with lots of FCs

hard bricks:
- you are unable to enter the recovery mode by pressing the keys
- you are unable to enter the download mode by pressing the keys
- you are unable to enter the download mode with a usb jig
- you only see a blank, black screen
- the phone does not response at all after power up and just like running out of battery, but you can feel it is warm somewhere near the camera at the back

do's and don'ts:
as time goes by, there are more and more victums. as to play safe, especially for normal users and those without warranty, it is suggested that:
- do not upgrade to ICS XXLPY yet
- do not flash any affected roms
- do not flash roms in the recovery, neither cwm nor stock XXLPY
- do not wipe or format disks in the recovery
- do not run factory reset in settings on your phone with leaked ICS or LPY based roms
- stick with a safe rom for now (at the moment, all Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread roms are REGARDED as safe)
- go back to one of the roms that confirmed safe if possible, but IF AND ONLY IF you know what you are doing and what you need to do

important:
if you want to go back to gb or other safe roms (no guarantee and do it at your own risks):
- use pc odin to flash a safe rom only
- not until a safe rom is flashed, do not use the recovery or factory reset
- no need to care about the yellow triangle thing, it is easy to get rid of it
- in case the phone FCs (force closes), don worry, they can be fixed
- you should bear in mind that rom flashing is dangerous itself

nevertheless, developers are trying to find out the root causes. so in the meantime, be patient and wait for a solution or newer and safer roms

finally, i want to end this with one more advice: do not have the wrong impression of offical roms or products are 100% safe and harmless. this is not the case in our real world. otherwise, there wont be any windows sp1/sp2... sp5, osx 10.0/10.3... 10.7, ios 4.0/4.0.1... 4.2, android 2.2.1/2.3.6... 4.0.3/4.0.4, linux kernel 2.6.27.62/2.3.35.13.. 3.2.17. there wont be any recall of defective cars, contaminated medicine and the like. you may argue that why ppl still using them? simple enough, just because we don have better alternatives but have to rely on them for now, at least